What do you think?
Rate this book
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #90
Granta 90: Country Life
Country how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over. An issue that ranges from English fox-hunters to the rice-planters of the Ganges delta.
Tim Adams goes on a fox hunt, Craig Taylor returns to Akenfield thirty-five years after Ronald Blythe's landmark book, Jeff Sharlet finds out what's eating rural Coloradans. Plus Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, Barry Lopez, Orhan Pamuk and Tim Winton on the weather. And Matthew Reisz on his grandmother's affair with Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies.
Tim Adams goes on a fox hunt, Craig Taylor returns to Akenfield thirty-five years after Ronald Blythe's landmark book, Jeff Sharlet finds out what's eating rural Coloradans. Plus Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, Barry Lopez, Orhan Pamuk and Tim Winton on the weather. And Matthew Reisz on his grandmother's affair with Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies.
256 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2005
1 person is currently reading
36 people want to read
About the author
Ian Jack
139 books10 followersIan Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 7, 2025
Reading this allowed me to have more interesting conversations than if I hadn’t read it. I sure didn’t make it my whole personality, certainly not at all
August 13, 2010
Richard Powers' short story, "The Seventh Event," is the only short story I am always looking forward to re-reading. The powerful critiques, half house-rave, half-manifesto, issued by the main character, a bio-engineer turned literary critic, Mimi Erdmann, have fundamentally challenged my own understanding of literature, not to mention my sense of vocation, and my place in the world. Today, when I re-read it, I realized that I have been drastically misunderstanding the story for six years. In other words, my attempts to live, and write, for the past six years, have, in a limited but significant sense, been based on an understanding that stemmed from a botched replication of the meaning of this story.
Simply put, I took the story as a challenge to widen the literary canvas, to look beyond the frailties of the human ego (the subject of 99.9% of literature) to create empathy, or at least a brutalistic understanding of the non-human world. Today, I realized that the real masterpiece in the story is not so much Erdmann's ecocritical heresies as the character of Erdmann herself. She is the most moving aspect of the story, and Powers, despite hinting at the immensity that lies outside the human experience, chooses to write an immensely sympathetic portrayal of a difficult, complicated, woman -- the sympathy I feel for her ideas stems from the sympathy I feel for her as a person, and for Powers' obvious admiration of her.
This is the crucial paragraph, towards the end of the story, which hadn't jumped out at me before: "Awareness--narrative imagination--is just the latest reckless experiment set loose by faulty transcription. Who knows what survival benefits it has? Natural selection may snuff it out tomorrow. The flaw of narrative imagination, in its current form, is that we can only feel the big in terms of the little. We have written the end of our current story, but we cannot read it yet. I cannot begin to grasp the end of big animals, or even the mere extinction of humans. But I could make up Mia Erdmann, and almost grasp her end." The way he ends the story, the next two paragraphs, are brilliant.
One disapointment is Erdmann's brusque treatment of David Abram. She quibbles with him over terms (the meaning of 'last') instead of engaging with his radically phenomenological critique. But, obviously, this is one of Powers' triumphs -- why I am quibbling with the quibbles of a fictional, dead, literary critic? Isn't it because, at least in part, I know that she's four foot four and once sang "Getting to Know You" while clad in black Vietcong pamajas while enrolled in high school at the International School in Bangkok?
*****
Some of Erdmann's thoughts on ecocriticism, which, in earlier readings of this story, I found powerfully compelling:
Powers narrates Erdmann's life as well as the twists, turns, and sometimes about-turns in her ecocriticism.
She declares, "Life is botched self-replication. It stems from a single command: copy this, again and again and again. Crucially, that copying is not wholly accurate. Otherwise we would have stopped at pretty crystals. Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students--speculation on the loose. The crazed self-copier, DNA, is runaway and indifferent, erecting endless botched, diverging organisms as delivery systems. Each of one of its current twelve and a half million species serves as a postulate about its environment. Most of them are viral and opportunistic. All are shaped for exploitation, dependent on the whole...We large animals are hopelessly macroscopicentric. In fact, any life form bigger than a thimble is a fluky, precarious, exceptional, composite kludge job. There are more cells in a baby's finger than people in the world, and each of these cells is itself an ecosystem, already a colony of assimilated slave species. A single Amazon tree top harbours three dozen species of ant. What does it mean to be alive? The real, bedrock deal is vegetative, fungal, invisible: superbugs, extremophiles, bacteria that thrive on acid and salt, that never see the sun, that live in suspended animation 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, or mass in a spoon of soil in concentrations beyond anyone's ability to number. What would a literature that knew all this look like?"
She writes, "When our stories yearn for a vanished world, green and pleasant, they do so out of sheer terror, however suppressed, at the real look of the energy bazaar that truly surrounds and encloses us...Any writer who invokes the environment or the non-human living world as a transcendental moral category does so out of very human motives...Any system that separates the natural from the human is already thinking anti-ecologically."
And elsewhere, "Nature is not our zoo. We must get away from golly-green wide-eyed wonder. Wonder is too easy a dodge, a massive distraction from the more prosaic question of just what toxins we are sending downstream."
And of course, she rants against the 'owl worshippers' -- "They think that advocating on behalf of some gigantic, fluffy species exonerates them. If they knew for one instant the pressure their own mere existence puts on the rest of the cracking web, they would take their own lives."
Simply put, I took the story as a challenge to widen the literary canvas, to look beyond the frailties of the human ego (the subject of 99.9% of literature) to create empathy, or at least a brutalistic understanding of the non-human world. Today, I realized that the real masterpiece in the story is not so much Erdmann's ecocritical heresies as the character of Erdmann herself. She is the most moving aspect of the story, and Powers, despite hinting at the immensity that lies outside the human experience, chooses to write an immensely sympathetic portrayal of a difficult, complicated, woman -- the sympathy I feel for her ideas stems from the sympathy I feel for her as a person, and for Powers' obvious admiration of her.
This is the crucial paragraph, towards the end of the story, which hadn't jumped out at me before: "Awareness--narrative imagination--is just the latest reckless experiment set loose by faulty transcription. Who knows what survival benefits it has? Natural selection may snuff it out tomorrow. The flaw of narrative imagination, in its current form, is that we can only feel the big in terms of the little. We have written the end of our current story, but we cannot read it yet. I cannot begin to grasp the end of big animals, or even the mere extinction of humans. But I could make up Mia Erdmann, and almost grasp her end." The way he ends the story, the next two paragraphs, are brilliant.
One disapointment is Erdmann's brusque treatment of David Abram. She quibbles with him over terms (the meaning of 'last') instead of engaging with his radically phenomenological critique. But, obviously, this is one of Powers' triumphs -- why I am quibbling with the quibbles of a fictional, dead, literary critic? Isn't it because, at least in part, I know that she's four foot four and once sang "Getting to Know You" while clad in black Vietcong pamajas while enrolled in high school at the International School in Bangkok?
*****
Some of Erdmann's thoughts on ecocriticism, which, in earlier readings of this story, I found powerfully compelling:
Powers narrates Erdmann's life as well as the twists, turns, and sometimes about-turns in her ecocriticism.
She declares, "Life is botched self-replication. It stems from a single command: copy this, again and again and again. Crucially, that copying is not wholly accurate. Otherwise we would have stopped at pretty crystals. Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students--speculation on the loose. The crazed self-copier, DNA, is runaway and indifferent, erecting endless botched, diverging organisms as delivery systems. Each of one of its current twelve and a half million species serves as a postulate about its environment. Most of them are viral and opportunistic. All are shaped for exploitation, dependent on the whole...We large animals are hopelessly macroscopicentric. In fact, any life form bigger than a thimble is a fluky, precarious, exceptional, composite kludge job. There are more cells in a baby's finger than people in the world, and each of these cells is itself an ecosystem, already a colony of assimilated slave species. A single Amazon tree top harbours three dozen species of ant. What does it mean to be alive? The real, bedrock deal is vegetative, fungal, invisible: superbugs, extremophiles, bacteria that thrive on acid and salt, that never see the sun, that live in suspended animation 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, or mass in a spoon of soil in concentrations beyond anyone's ability to number. What would a literature that knew all this look like?"
She writes, "When our stories yearn for a vanished world, green and pleasant, they do so out of sheer terror, however suppressed, at the real look of the energy bazaar that truly surrounds and encloses us...Any writer who invokes the environment or the non-human living world as a transcendental moral category does so out of very human motives...Any system that separates the natural from the human is already thinking anti-ecologically."
And elsewhere, "Nature is not our zoo. We must get away from golly-green wide-eyed wonder. Wonder is too easy a dodge, a massive distraction from the more prosaic question of just what toxins we are sending downstream."
And of course, she rants against the 'owl worshippers' -- "They think that advocating on behalf of some gigantic, fluffy species exonerates them. If they knew for one instant the pressure their own mere existence puts on the rest of the cracking web, they would take their own lives."
May 10, 2018
Some real standouts in this issue:
1. The Death of A Chair - Doris Lessing
2. Constitutional - Helen Simpson
3. When Grandmama Was Young - Matthew Reisz
4. Fantastic Mr Fox - Tim Adams
5. Return To Akenfield - Craig Taylor
1. The Death of A Chair - Doris Lessing
2. Constitutional - Helen Simpson
3. When Grandmama Was Young - Matthew Reisz
4. Fantastic Mr Fox - Tim Adams
5. Return To Akenfield - Craig Taylor
August 20, 2020
Some of my favorites:
Return to Akenfield
Fantastic Mr Fox
The death of a chair
Nightwalking
Return to Akenfield
Fantastic Mr Fox
The death of a chair
Nightwalking
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews